(Active) Colophon

Production of this book would have been impossible without the use of a number of tools. Many of these were provided by their developers free of charge or as shareware. These include:

• the emacs editor and related tools from Gnu Project;
• the and formatting systems, and the OzTex port to MacOS;
• the gimp image manipulation package; and
• the Linux operating system,

to name only a few. Said another way, this text should be considered a beneficiary of the Open Source movement, as recently enunciated by E. S. Raymond’s Cathedral and the Bazaar and earlier by GNU Manifesto by R. Stallman.

I firmly believe in the future importance of the Open Source model and would like to express my appreciation in a more active way than simply listing the tools I've used. Cambridge University Press seems to believe there is at least some chance that FOA will make more money than it cost to produce; I'll believe that when I see it. Should that come to pass, however, it is because you (the reader) bought it, and I think you should get some of the credit! I therefore propose the following, admittedly unusual, procedure:

After expenses directly related to producing FOA, I hereby commit to passing on 50 percent of all royalties I receive from FOA to organizations who have produced the tools listed above (and others). If you go to the FOA Web site and register your copy of the text, you will then be allowed to “vote” on which of these worthy organizations you’d like the money to go to; the Web page will contain full details.